School for Materialist Research: Lecture by Vera Bühlmann
Materialism and the Public Nature of Knowledge: Michel Serres Circumstantial Universalism
Michel Serres is widely known as a philosopher of science, literature, and especially perhaps communication. But his philosophy is before all a natural philosophy, a veritable communicational physics (Bühlmann, 2020). This talk explores how to reconnect Serres’s neo-materialist thought of what I call circumstantial universalism not only with the ancient atomism of Lucretius, but also with the pre-Socratic monisms of Anaximander and Pythagoras. The latter both sought to mathematize the different approaches of their teachers and peer scholars to nature as physis (in the sense of a material (elemental) primary body, like water, fire, air etc). My argument will be that “mathematisation“ here – abstract, but still pre-formal (in the sense of pre-axiomatic) – is computational in a way that bears great actuality for how we can come to terms with computation today: especially Anaximanders’ accommodation of mechanics within the materially-circular and percolative mode of “being” of the meteora (with his notion of the apeiron) bears important clues for how we can learn to cope with the constitutive circuitous, self-referential “logics” that manifests through and is at work in computation also today.
Key to such an understanding is how one relates to the reality of time. Two related projects of contemporary thinkers, who both engage with computation in substantial rather than formalist manner, will be profiled in the light of each other such as to find a concrete milieu to situate the abstract speculations sketched above: The two projects are that of a Grand Récit of the Universe (Michel Serres) and that of The Unnameable Present (Roberto Calasso).
